Why it works: Endive and tarragon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
French Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the endive
Blanch the endive and wash it thoroughly.
Break the endive into small pieces using your fingers.
Shake the endive dry in a basket or fine cloth.
Assemble and serve
Arrange the endive in a salad bowl.
Strew minced herbs over the endive.
Add dressing just before serving.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
The flavor team
The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.
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Endive + tarragontop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together75 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Endive
- Provides the crisp, slightly bitter leaves that form the body and texture of the salad.
- Fresh herbs
- Add a fragrant, aromatic note that brightens the mild, bitter leaves.
- Dressing
- Adds moisture and flavour, and is added late so the leaves stay crisp.
The step that matters
Add dressing just before serving. Salt and acid in dressing draw water out of the leaves through osmosis, so they wilt and lose crispness if they sit dressed for long.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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